You may not know where Azerbaijan is, but in a dusty little town in the south-east hinterland of this former Soviet republic there is a two-year-old boy who can probably say with pretty high accuracy where you are. Meet Ayhan Abdullayev: toddler, local celebrity and national boy wonder who, though he has yet to master the grown-up art of comprehensible speech, possesses a phenomenal geographic memory enabling him to place more than 160 countries in all continents on a map of the world.
"Where's Afghanistan?" Ayhan's proud father, Ilgar, asked as he held the boy in front of a world map mounted on the wall. Ayhan immediately put his finger on the Central Asian country.
"'Atta boy'," his father responded, encouraging. "Where's Somalia?" Ayhan duly pointed it out. And so on, with just about any country on the face of the planet, with Ayhan occasionally pausing for a moment to think and then mechanically dropping his finger on even the most far-flung regions.
Abdullayev the elder, a school history teacher, thought nothing of it when his pint-sized offspring made it clear one evening last year that he wanted to be lifted up for a better look at the world map fixed to the wall in his father's study.
"I thought he liked the map because the countries are all different colors," Abdullayev said recently at his home. "I decided to tell him what some of the countries were called anyway, thinking it wouldn't stick."
But stick it did, as Abdullayev discovered a few evenings later, when the curly-haired Ayhan decided to give his dad a geography lesson of his own and his father realised that the boy had a memory for geography uncommon in most adults, not to speak of two-year-olds.
"It was late and I was tired," Abdullayev recounted. "I pointed to the map and kept repeating 'Spain, Spain'. Ayhan began to grumble and shake his head. I looked at the map and saw that I was mistakenly pointing to Italy. That's when I realised that he had skills."
Last summer, when Ayhan was only 18 months old, the boy won a stereo system for his family and a trophy on Azerbaijan's televised talent competition Mardjshow.
A video recording of the performance is now prime-time entertainment at family gatherings.
In his family's cramped but cozy flat, Ayhan demonstrated his thorough knowledge of local geography too, while a crowd of teenage girls from neighbouring apartments peered through the door into the living room to watch.
In between bouts of stomping a map of his homeland, the wide-eyed toddler pointed out two-dozen cities ranging from towns in Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region in the south-west to the Jewish enclave near the Russian border in Guba in the north.
But don't despair if your two-year-old refuses to learn the alphabet. According to Azerbaijan's chief paediatrician, Nasib Kuliyev, two-year-olds have the capability to memorise amazing amounts of information, most just lack the desire to do so.
"You can train a child to do almost anything, but if he's two-years-old and actually does it - that's talent," Kuliyev said.
Ayhan's mother Zamina seemed to confirm that it was her son's love for maps that gave him the ability to learn.
"He behaves the same way as his brother Heydar did when he was his age, the difference is that Heydar has to be asked to do something and Ayhan asks himself to be taught," she said.
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